http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bgY8lQMFy4There are plenty of ways robots can kill us. A computer could malfunction and send nukes to every nation in the world, or an errant Roomba could get fed up with this cat.
But the scariest robot takeovers are the ones in which a man-made AI
robot revolts. There is something terrible and poetic about a creation
turning on its master, and becoming the silicon overlord to all
carbon-based life-forms.

By
now you've probably seen or heard that this week's Phoenix is the Metal Issue -- and
it should come as a pleasant surprise for any genre loyalist to learn
that our staff hand-picked a badass painting by the prolific Ken Kelly
as the issue's cover art (above). Though this dude has crafted iconic images of
everyone from Conan the Barbarian to Tarzan to Vampirella, his most
recognizable work is a pair of album covers he painted of KISS for
1976's Destroyer and 1977's Love Gun

With
Doctor Who returning to TV with its midseason premiere and Chuck
entering its final season, we're guaranteed some staple nerd
fodder on TV this season; but, as usual, all eyes are on the fresh crop
of pilots from the harvest. Though we're still mourning what's been
chucked and shucked (Locke and Key would have been amazing, wouldn't it?), we must now set our sights on the spread on the table before us.

Can
you smell it, Bostonians? Can you smell it in the air? That, my
friends, is the scent of the end of summer. Soon, the thousands of students
we have been missing (or perhaps not missing) will return; everything
will be open later, as summer hours will end; but so will the long
days, warm nights and dreamy endlessness of summer.

Unlike
the green line blowing right by your stop while you wait in the rain,
the handbasket we're in ain't exactly going express to hell. We've got a
few pit stops along the way. Nerds, dweebs, and inbetweeners, you
better get ready, because this is a week of culture. With art shows and
book readings, music, gorillas, German potlucks and Twilight, your
bonds ‘bout to get straight diversified

It's
a bleak, bleak week in the US, Laser Orgians. With the economy
taking a nose-dive and the threat of double-dip recession (which sounds
more like JP Licks flavor of the month than a real thing but, woefully,
it is the latter) it is time to distract our burdened minds with some
good-old-fashioned escapism.

Well, it turns out that the Monkey Issue was a good idea after all; Rise of the Planet of the Apes actually opened to rave reviews. Even after the five other Apes movies
in the original series and Tim Burton's lackluster re-boot in 2001,
audiences still want their fill of ape-on-human action. The film opened
to $54 million dollars- that's $20 million more than the top-end of what
was predicted.

Time
capsules are primarily produced as elementary school class projects,
leaving history in the hands of archivists most concerned with the
preservation of their Pokemon cards and A+ spelling tests -- not
necessarily the best way to provide an accurate picture of life at a
given moment.

To get it right, you need a grander scale and better technology, which is exactly the combination director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott had on their side when they set out to create the user-generated documentary Life In A Day

It's
finally here. People count down to this for months. As soon as the
weather starts to change, it's fresh in everyone's minds -- the ritual,
the camaraderie, the friends and families gathering together, all to
celebrate overlarge cartilaginous fish with rows and rows of
flesh-ripping teeth. Yes, ladies and gentlemen: it's Shark Week